Nicholas Galanin, Fair Warning: A Sacred Place, 2019. Photographic prints and audio. 44 x 64 in each.
Description
A conversation with Indigenous artist, activist, and scholar Anne Spice, interviewed by Speculations on the Infrared curator Christopher Green. Inscribed within our current exhibition Speculations on the Infrared, this virtual event is presented as part of a series of conversations with Indigenous correspondents who are engaged with struggles for political and cultural sovereignty across the continent.
Green interviewed Spice on the connections between her ongoing scholarly work, the relationship between colonial cultural institutions and the denial of Indigenous land and resource rights, and her role as an anti-colonial organizer—in particular her work with Indigenous land defenders in the Wet’suwet’en territories in Northern British Columbia who are fighting the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline through unceded territory. The traditional territory of the Wet’suwet’en occupies an area of 22,000 square kilometres (8500 square miles) that is unceded, i.e. not governed by any treaty with the settler government of Canada.
For more background on Wet’suwet’en opposition to the Coastal GasLink, see:
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/unceded-land-case-wetsuweten-sovereignty
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About the Speakers
Anne Spice (she/they) is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation, a queer Indigenous feminist and anti-colonial organizer, acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Ryerson University, and an Associate Fellow at the Yellowhead Institute. She has been actively supporting the Indigenous land re-occupation on Wet’suwet’en territories since 2015, and her work dwells in the intersection of traditional land use, Indigenous geographies, histories of Indigenous resistance, poetry and art. Her writing has been published in Environment and Society, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and Asparagus Magazine.
Christopher Green (he/him) is a writer and art historian based in New York. His research and writing focus on modern and contemporary Indigenous art and primitivisms of the historic and the neo-avant-garde. His criticism, essays, and reviews have appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Frieze, and the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications, and he has contributed catalog essays to the Heard Museum, New Museum, Artists Space, the James Gallery. His scholarly research has been published in ARTMargins, Winterthur Portfolio, ab-Original, and BC Studies, and in 2019 he co-edited issue 11 of SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL. His research has been supported by the Dedalus Foundation, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, the International Council for Canadian Studies, the Sealaska Heritage Institute, Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. He holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of art history at the University of North Texas.